Complainant pays price in Manitoba judge inquiry

Alex Chapman’s niceness or lack of it is not in question. The inquiry is trying to decide if Lori Douglas meets the high standards of the Canadian judiciary. Instead, it is heading down the path of wild point-missing.

What a hardscrabble life Alex Chapman has had, and how much worse it is now.

Ever since he complained that Winnipeg lawyer Jack King had tried in 2003 to coerce him into having sex with King’s lawyer wife, Lori Douglas, now a judge, Chapman has lost his job, been hauled into a public inquiry into the appointment of said judge, and been publicly destroyed.

It makes you fear to speak out about secret scandal, lest you become an Alex Chapman, your computer taken, your diaries read, your secrets exposed.

The latest allegation — unproven — offered to the council inquiry by Douglas’s Toronto lawyer, Sheila Block, at a Winnipeg hearing is that Chapman has been paid for performing pornographic acts online and once kept a “little black book” of online photos of women he had slept with.

Clearly, he must not be a nice man at all.

This is absurd. His niceness or lack of it is not in question. The inquiry is trying to decide if Douglas meets the high standards of the Canadian judiciary. Instead, it is heading down the path of wild point-missing, and that’s how the day went.

It’s a tribute to the decency and intelligence of the council that they flatly refused to admit the allegations, which were derived from a Charter-violating computer search. As Catherine Fraser, chief justice of Alberta and chair of the Canadian Judicial Council’s inquiry panel, said crisply, such allegations are both dubious and irrelevant.

The council is investigating “unwanted sex in the context of the judiciary,” not any “consensual sex” Chapman may have engaged in. Indeed, as Chapman’s lawyer pointed out, admitting that evidence would lead the inquiry down a sickening path, demonizing consensual sex, including any that Douglas may have had. Or us, for that matter. Think of the implications.

But the damage was done. It was as if Chapman had been labelled a floozy in a rape trial. The rules are looser in a public inquiry than in a courtroom and the results are repellent.

Douglas, fighting to retain her job as a Manitoba associate chief justice — she was first given a judgeship in 2005 — has been damaged, too. The photos King posted online of her naked and manacled are impossible to erase from memory. It’s hard to see how she can keep her job.

But it would take a hard heart not to pity Chapman as he struggled during testimony at the inquiry being held in a stifling courtroom this week and next. The man is not a lawyer. He is black and was originally solicited for sex because King, who is white, found it erotic to imagine his wife having sex with a black man.

The courtroom is almost entirely filled with white people. Block, who at one point appeared to mock Chapman for not knowing the difference between the words “entirety” and “entity,” suggested that Douglas could never have been interested in Chapman sexually, and naturally “went back to her house in the country and her garden and her child.”

It’s as if there’s a world of sweetness and a world of sordid, and we’re supposed to sort people out that way. Life isn’t like that.

Chapman, born in Trinidad, has a heavy accent and does not always follow legal questions well. He’s not good about dates, distant or recent. His legal history is complicated, his domestic life chaotic. He is irascible. And who among us would not be?

The inquiry is studying four questions. Did Douglas sexually harass Chapman? Was she honest when she was screened for judicial appointment? Did she fully disclose all facts to the inquiry before it began?

And can she work as a judge in any capacity when we can go online and hunt down photos of her engaging in sado-masochistic sex? For nothing vanishes online, much as we might wish it to.

The hearing continues tomorrow, with Jack King, the man who started this bonfire, scheduled to testify.

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